Alberta’s post-secondary campuses recently adopted the Chicago Principles —a specific kind of commitment to free speech— as per the orders of Kenney’s UCP government. Roberta Lexier from Mount Royal University joins Team Advantage to dig into the matter. What is this sudden concern with free speech about? Don’t conservatives already run most of Alberta’s campuses? Are content warnings really that big of a deal?
Alberta’s UCP government recently announced a plan to reduce surgical wait times: farming out 80,000 surgeries to private, for-profit providers. Ricardo Acuna, Executive Director of the Parkland Institute, joins Team Advantage to discuss the legacy of private for-profit health service delivery in Alberta. Has it ever worked? Does it produce any beneficial results? What does it do to our public health care system?
Read Ricardo’s Parkland Institute blog post.
Follow Ricardo at @RicAcuna, and follow the Parkland Institute’s work at parklandinstitute.ca and @ParklandInst.
Jason Kenney’s UCP government recently wrested control of about $78.5 billion in pension assets from working Albertans, and is musing aloud about using it to prop up Alberta oil and gas companies. What’s behind this outrageous pension grab? What is AIMCo going to do with this cash? How did we get into a situation where people’s deferred wages (pensions) create these vast pools of capital that can be used against workers?
[Tyler mentions that the CPP is fully funded, it is currently funded on a “steady-state” basis (pay-as-you-go with a reserve fund). The CPP enhancement which raises the replacement rate from 25% to 33.33% (phased in by 2025) will be fully funded.]
It’s been a week, hasn’t it? Team Advantage gets together to discuss a week of rapid-fire bad news. What is one to do when all the “checks and balances” our political system is supposed to have seem to get stripped away? Might there be some sort of power that could be organized to intervene? Listen in wonder as Team Advantage explains the difference between a legal strike position (which is very difficult to attain) and an illegal strike (including wildcat and sympathy strikes, which tend be highly effective, but are obviously illegal so you should never do them).
In late August 2019 at the Calgary Petroleum Club, representatives from Birchcliff Energy and Tourmaline Oil presented a remarkable piece of petro-propaganda to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. It was instantly retweeted by Jason Kenney, stating “Enough is enough. No more apologies. We are proud of Alberta and Canada’s oil and gas.” Join Team Advantage as we watch and analyze this crypto-fascist piece of media!
The ad in question is produced by Canadians for Canada’s Future, and is located here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlAil_zuyBw
For more about this industry front group, check out their website:
https://www.canadiansforcanadasfuture.ca
Jason Kenney’s new budget is making Albertans everywhere pay more so that large, profitable corporations can get billions of dollars in tax cuts. Team Advantage assembles to survey the damage. What’s with the attacks on organized labour? What’s the point of austerity, if it’s proven not to create jobs or growth?
Far from instituting a worker’s state, labour under Alberta’s NDP saw the government pursue wage containment and strike avoidance, often in the process undermining their own union supporters. Why is it that a supposed left-wing government prided itself on delivering zero-percent increases to public sector unions? How did the NDP’s failure to take on the fossil fuel industry make them look weak and hypocritical?
Nick Driedger joins Team Advantage to discuss his latest piece for online publication Organizing Work, entitled “The Ugly Reality of Unions under Social Democracy.”
Read it here: https://organizing.work/2019/10/the-ugly-reality-of-unions-under-social-democracy/
Check out Organizing Work and the WOBcast at https://organizing.work
What’s the logic behind “chasing the centre” as an electoral strategy, and why is it no longer holding up in the age of populism? Why is the strategy of targeting swing voters no longer the key to winning elections? Team Advantage assembles to examine the Median Voter Theorem, assess its assumptions, and explain why this model is failing.
This episode features audio from an Alberta NDP election ad, posted April 3rd, 2019.
Alberta’s minimum wage is now “frozen,” which means it will slowly be eroded by inflation. How many minimum- or low-wage workers are there in Alberta, and what do they look like? Joel French, Executive Director of Public Interest Alberta, joins Team Advantage to examine the consequences of the wage freeze, consider who’s affected, discuss the realities of low-wage housing, and think on what to do about that pesky 1%.
Twitter: @JoelFrench and @PIAlberta
Read PIA’s report here.
Read the CCPA’s report on rental housing here.
Read about the 1% doing really great here.
Martin Lukacs joins Team Advantage to discuss his new book, The Trudeau Formula: Seduction and Betrayal in an Age of Discontent. How does Trudeau represent a rehabilitation of capitalism’s image after the Harper years? What has been the purpose of Trudeau’s “reconciliation industry?” How does Trudeau understand popular struggle? And last but not least, what happened with the LEAP manifesto during the 2016 Federal NDP convention in Edmonton?
Purchase Martin’s book online: http://www.trudeauformula.com